Dept. of Eventual Leverage 

Dept. of Distraction 

Think (or better yet, blog) about it 

Department of Identity Hell 

Customer Relationship Mismanagement 

Say where 

Say how 

Say when 

Say why 

The tangled Web 

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Anyway, the point of almost all customer satisfaction surveys is to be used as a whipping tool against the people who answer the phone. The goal is cutting costs and increasing profit, customer service be damned.

In a market society, you get what you pay for, right?

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A producerist economy is one in which market choices are limited to producer silos alone. Such is the case with hospitality, commercial aviation and car rental. Until recently it was also the case with operating systems and IM systems as well.

Congrats on the latter, btw. :-)

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Make the page wider and reload it. Or at least that's always worked for me.

OTOH, I've flagged lots of bogus sites and I haven't noticed that anything's actually happening as a result of that.

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Yeah, blogs are bad at threaded conversations, in some ways. This particular discussion has gone on here, at Dave Taylor's blog, at Blogspotting, at Micropersuasion, at feedwriter, at the others you already listed... but it's happening, and htat's an important thing, yes?

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Anyway, customer service is a cost center, not a profit center, and the idea is to drive those costs down. This was the subject of a discussion I had recently where I was involved in reporting metrics for a huge company's call centers--too short a response time indicated that the center was overstaffed. The point is to minimize the cost. Degradation customer of customer service in the process is a bug, not a feature, but you still pay for it.

(I was a customer of that company, and yes, their phone support was slow, yet highly competent once you got ahold of them. I'd like to think my wait time was a measure of how much time they spent with other people. Not.)

(By the way, this is what is meant by running government like a business, but let's not talk about emergency preparedness in New Orleans just now, 'cause that'll just get me all pissed off.)

The producerist/consumerist distinction is interesting, but unsatisfying. What you're saying is true, perhaps, about businesses, but it has little to say about my life, where my autonomy as a laborer/producer has been steadily eroded the last thirty years or so, and my ability to consume has been celebrated. Really, I'm neither a consumer nor a customer--I'm a citizen, and I don't like being defined elsewise.

I guess I was unclear on one point: I'm not claiming that "customer be damned" constitues a market society. I'm claiming that a society which is market-fundamentalist produces, tolerates, encourages, celebrates "customer be damned" practices if they maximize profit. The market constrains choices to those it gives us and all the sellers have the same motivation to cut costs. That's a race to the bottom in progress.

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As for what's happening in markets...

If every company were motivated only to drive costs to zero, and to maximize profits alone, the world would be a far less interesting place. Most businesses exist because somebody had a passion that transcended the profits on which their company would ultimately depend. True, there is much abuse, but to focus only profits-before-all and customers-be-damned is to miss most of what actually happens in business.

How has your autonomy as a producer been eroding? I find that an amazing statement. I could understand if you were a longshoreman or worked in a lumber mill. But for somebody of your talents and achievementss, I would think the horizons have expanded, especially in the autonomy and independence directions. At your age I got off food stamps by taking a job in advertising because my options as a writer and broadcaster had essentially closed. Now they're so wide open I hardly know what to do with them all.

As for labels like market, consumer, producer, customer and so on... for years I've been calling for more literal and conscious meanings and usages for all of them. I wasn't trying to define you as a customer versus something else; but rather to make clear what those words mean. I believe consumers are reciprocals of producers, and customers are reciprocals of vendors (or sellers, or merchants). In the context of conversations and relationships, without which we wouldn't have markets in which anybody could maximize anything, customers are far more empowered and interesting and important than consumers. Calling customers "consumers" is, I think, a degrading thing to do.

All that said, I think we're still going to disagree, because your vision of market progress is that of a half-full glass that's emptying, and mine is of a half-full glass that's filling.

Or am I wrong about that?

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My name is Steve and I work on Intuit’s community involvement team.

First of all, I’d like to apologize for the difficulty you encountered in trying to get your product registered, the poor quality of the phone line which undoubtedly caused additional irritation and the amount of time it took to get it accomplished.

Our goal at Intuit is to provide a “WOW” end to end experience for our customers and very much want your feedback as to how we are doing. Our website (www.quickbooks.com) provides for just such an avenue if you’ll click on the ‘support’ button at the top of the page and then the ‘provide feedback’ link on the left side of the next page, you will be able to leave feedback about any part of our operation. This feedback is evaluated and acted on by a special group of customer advocates.

I will happily take ownership of your particular issues to insure that your feedback gets to the appropriate personnel if you will include Doc Searl and your contact information so that I can find it.

I look forward to working with you to make our support work better for you and others.

BTW, you can also get help with this and other issues at our new community site where users help other users with issues like this. Check it out at: http://www.quickbooksgroup.com You'll find tips and tricks, downloadable forms, blogs, and much more including an entire forum dedicated to MAC issues...

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I'll write something more thoughtful about markets later on--right now, hunger, work, and Biloxi call.

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And once again, I stand (or sit, or crouch) corrected. Sorry about that. For some reason I thought you were D.J. Did I also guess your age wrong, too? Might as well correct all kinds of stuff here...

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Much appreciated.

I should point out that this is a problem encountered by my accountant, who happens to use QuickBooks mostly on PCs (but on a Mac in this case, where the new software was installed). I was just trying to provide some additional support, since I'm a lot more technical than she is (though far less than I'd like to be).

While we're talking, however, I have to say that it would be cool if you guys came out with a version of QuickBooks (and other products) for Linux as well. According to IDC, there are actually more Linux machines in the world than Macs, and most of those are in corporate rather than home settings. Also, the Linux experience is much closer to QuickBooks' Windows mainstream then the Mac experience (use of the control rather than the command key, for example). (And I've got more Linux than Mac machines laying around here, waiting to work as accouting workstations.)

You're going to be doing it anyway, trust me. :-)

Thanks again for writing!

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